Luckily for him, his message wasn’t embarassing, just forwarding some financial info to his mom. But it gave almost 40,000 people access to almost 40,000 different inboxes, and the internet being the internet, this mistake was exploited immediately.

The massive email chain started to branch out endlessly into conversation and subconversations, like the comments on a website or a Reddit thread. Naturally a lot of the emails looked like a lot of the internet: nostalgia and nonsequitors. For example, one sub-thread devoted itself to sending a flood of images of Nicholas Cage.